If a feminist says X, doesn’t that mean that someone saying not X or anti-X is an anti-feminist? Your initial impulse might be to say yes, but the answer is not necessarily. It depends on what X is and what feminists mean by X. It also depends on whether feminists actually want X or are just saying it. If a feminist says X, picking the opposite position of X without analyzing what the feminists actually mean and whether feminists are being honest when they say X is letting feminists define your reality. Increasingly, this is what tradcons are doing.

A good example of this is the word, “equality”. When a MRA like Paul Elam says the word, “equality”, he is talking about things like equality before the law (fair trials, innocent until proven guilty, etc.). In other words, Paul Elam is speaking in standard English. When a feminist says “equality” they are completely redefining the term to be something else, namely men and women being completely the same (with enforcement by a large oppressive government). This is not standard English, but that isn’t the worst problem. Even by “feministese”, feminists are lying because what they really want is female supremacism.

“Equality” isn’t the only example of tradcons doing this. You can see the same thing with Mark Richardson’s (Oz Conservative) “autonomy theory”. It’s a long philosophical treatise that uses common English terms (like “autonomy”) are completely redefines them. In many cases, it redefines them into the “feministese” version of those terms.

Trying to confront tradcons about this is useless. They just hide behind “philosophy” when you confront them. The problem is tradcon thinking and language has been completely taken over by feminism. Saying the opposite of what the feminists say when your ideas and language is completely controlled by them, does not make you an anti-feminist. All it means is that you have let feminists define and control your reality.

24 Responses to “Tradcons Let Feminists Define Their Reality”

The word “trad-con” gets bandied about a bit. Dalrock uses it negatively as a term to describe certain socially conservative Christian Americans who support the traditional family but who have collapsed in certain ways in supporting a divorce culture or who blame men for problems within the family. But these people do not describe themselves as trad-con and probably haven’t heard of the term. I think too that Dalrock exaggerates the extent to which these people have influenced the larger culture. It’s possible they’ve had some influence in the U.S. (hard to tell from here in Australia) but outside the U.S. they barely register. There is a smaller movement of people who once self-described as trad-con, but who now mostly use the term “traditionalists”, such as myself, the late Lawrence Auster, Laura Wood and so on. There is one commenter at Laura Wood’s site who does insist on chivalry no matter what, but he is the exception in terms of the arguments made at traditionalist sites. In general it is untrue to claim that we blame men or pander to women – if anyone doubts this they should visit either my site or Laura’s.

Needed to be said,but probably won’t be heard anyway. Good effort,though.

We aren’t against traditionalism because we are like feminists, we are against traditionalism because tradcons nurture feminists with female supremacist beliefs and give them all the fuel for their inborn bigotry against men that they need. Feminists say men are dirty evil shits and tradcons say “Yes,they are, but if we inject more Jesus into the situation,that’ll change.”,then feminists,naturally, say “Fuck that, let’s get some jackbooted thugs to tase them a few times and take everything they got and give it to women.” and tradcons say “Oh,that’s a good idea, but Jesus says no…” and all the feminist hears is “Good idea” and does it her way.

I think you descirbed the real point of difference between us when you wrote:

“Your arguments against “autonomy” assume that feminists are living autonomously (or honestly trying to). You have let them define your reality as well. To those of us speaking in standard English, it sounds like you have a problem with “autonomy” as it is in actual reality. This doesn’t surprise me since traditionalism is a collectivist ideology.”

It’s not that we are letting feminists define our reality. We do ourselves have a problem with autonomy being considered the overriding good in society. So we oppose feminists who define their politics around autonomy and we draw fire from those anti-feminists who also wish to hold to autonomy as an overriding good. Obviously, those anti-feminists are going to claim that feminists have autonomy wrong. For myself, I just don’t think that’s the right angle to take. I don’t think you can escape the fact that autonomy has to be balanced with a range of other goods. In other words, I don’t think you can derfine autonomy in such a way that it always comes out trumps.

The fact that you take aim at collectives is perhaps an indication of this. Isn’t the family a collective? The nation?

I’m not sure I understand the point being made here. Liberals use the word “autonomy” to mean something particular, namely a freedom of the individual to self-define or self-determine. There are many feminists who have run with this definition of autonomy and applied it to the lives of women: they have wanted to maximise the extent to which women are able to live self-defining or self-determining lives. It sounds nice, but the devil is in the details. It means that feminists don’t want to be defined by their sex, or by their relationships with men, or by motherhood, or family. It means too that an independent single girl lifestyle, particularly one focusing on career, is prioritised. That doesn’t by any means explain everything about feminism, and there are even some feminists who are critical of the idea of liberal autonomy, but time and again you find feminists invoking autonomy to justify their politics.

If you think that liberals and feminists have defined autonomy falsely, that’s fine. But if you want to understand them, you have to understand the way that they themselves use the term.

Liberals use the word “autonomy” to mean something particular, namely a freedom of the individual to self-define or self-determine. There are many feminists who have run with this definition of autonomy and applied it to the lives of women: they have wanted to maximise the extent to which women are able to live self-defining or self-determining lives.

Here is another perfect example of the problem I was talking about. Feminists have made women dependent on the government (as opposed to dependent on individual men as they were before). Thus women are not “autonomous” now, (nor were they in the past). In no way are women living, “self-defining or self-determining lives”. As a result, your entire analysis is incorrect. Plus, you are communicating to us that feminists are honest, which is not true.

You’re mistaking what’s happening here. When I say that feminists base their arguments on autonomy it doesn’t mean that I think they are actually living autonomously. There is ideology and there is reality. The two are different. I am attempting to describe and to criticise an ideology. From there, you can then make criticisms of where the ideology is not lived up to or you can even make the argument that the movement is driven by some factor other than the formal ideology it espouses. However, my analysis that a major ideological justification of feminism is autonomy is perfectly correct as it is stated over and over again by individual feminists and by nations such as Sweden which have adopted feminism as part of the state ideology.

And yet their claims of “autonomy” don’t even cut it at that benchmark. The smoking gun here is that such claims are always made within the umbrella of gynocentrism, where accountability is more than merely neglected, it is completely discarded.

When I say that feminists base their arguments on autonomy it doesn’t mean that I think they are actually living autonomously.

Your arguments against “autonomy” assume that feminists are living autonomously (or honestly trying to). You have let them define your reality as well. To those of us speaking in standard English, it sounds like you have a problem with “autonomy” as it is in actual reality. This doesn’t surprise me since traditionalism is a collectivist ideology.

traditional conservatives believe that when you die you get to live in the clouds with all your dead relatives and pets and you can do everything that makes you happy as long as it doesn’t involve sex or alcohol (ie, nothing).

“Saying the opposite of what the feminists say when your ideas and language is completely controlled by them, does not make you an anti-feminist”

They also let the feminists call the shots by just having a reflex reaction to whatever feminists say. Again, showing that tradcons have a hard time standing for something on their own even though they claim to be the masters of standing for values.

“a big part of the anti-feminist argument is to show that feminists are redefining language when it suits them”

and the twra made up word-femicadism–does just that. An attempt to redefine language by making up their own.

That’s not exactly true. They have values of “entitlement” and “empowerment” [all of which are devoid of accountability of course] so there’s also a bucketload of female infanalisationist dogma in the mix as well.

Ultimately what you’re dealing with, as misandry isn’t designed to eradicate men, but rather to dehumanise them into a perpetual slave class (notice that even Valerie Solanas and Mary Daly can’t bring themselves to advocate for the eradication of ALL men), is a gynocentist set of ethics/values.

This is where the movement does need to start looking deeper. What you have said here is absolutely spot on PMAFT, but the fact is that there are often blind spots with the MRM and in fact your post both makes and misses the mark at the same time. Maybe you were taking a remedial level approach to this issue, I don’t know, but I honestly feel that this hasn’t gone deeply enough.

The fact is that feminism isn’t our ultimate enemy. Granted, it’s a dangerous symbiote that has heaped infinite injustice on us over the past century, however it is ultimately just that – a symbiote.

As simple biology tells us – a symbiote can only survive so long as it has a host to leech its sustenance from.

Likewise, tradcon ideology is also a symbiote. What both actually feed from is gynocentrism.

Now granted, people will often recognise this when it comes up, but how quickly when issues come up, do people approach issues of misandry from the point of view of just attacking feminism or going a level deeper, just attacking tradcons.

Yet when people do that, they mistake the symbiote for the host and the deeper issues are either improperly explored or handled in a way which actually benefits the host.

Three examples I’d point to here of this, are responses to where I challenged the use of the term “mangina”, where I rejected the notion of the vast majority of the psychological differences between men and women being entirely biological and where I have challenged stoicism.

In response, I was accused by people here of being a concern troll, a closet supporter of the feminist notion of androgyny and a closet socialist respectively.

What these responses betray is a superficial understanding of the misandry perpetuated by gynocentrism. I opposed the usage of the term “mangina” because the approach such a term takes is that of gynocentric inter male social policing. As such by reinforcing gynocentric practices, you ultimately reinforce an aspect of gynocentrism, and therefore gynocentrism itself.

Yet because people were so focused on feminists and had lost sight of gynocentrism, I was written off as a “concern troll” for looking deeper than was politically convenient.

When it came to opposing the notion that the vast majority of differences between men and women are biological, it showed an equal ignorance of gynocentrism with responses I received. Certainly there may be general differences due to general physiological and therefore biochemical differences. However the reality is that as gynocentrism wants disposable men as perpetual protectors and providers for women, those differences have been amplified to ridiculous levels- entirely because wombs must be protected by non-womb bearers under the gynocentric imperative.

Until we deconstruct that social gynocentric construct, we’ll have no idea what authentic masculinity (or maleness) is.

Yet these claims are often met with accusation of feminist leanings – respite the fact that the feminist “gender construct” argument exists entirely to prop up the fallacy that is “patriarchal theory” and not only reinforce gynocentrism. Under feminist dogma, female infantalisation is amplified to perpetual female victimhood and male dispsability is amplified to perpetual male predatorhood – ie “the evil other” which must be wiped out “for the good of mankind”. Furthermore this actually enables gynosupremacism.

Then you have the opposition to stoicism. The strawman argument is that if you oppose stocisim, then somehow, you want to androgynise men and stop them from thriving. Yet these arguments ignore just what stoicism demands of an offers men.

Under stocisim, men are prohibited from feeling emotion, let alone unconditionally accepting and demonstrating emotions they heal. If they are perpetually calm, they are idealised; if they are emotional, they are emasculated.

When this approach extends to trauma, men are expected to repress their emotions rather than working through them and healing and so men are constantly pushing down injuries they encounter until something gives and it all takes its toll.

This even extends to men believing in many cases to “soldier through” an illness rather than seeking medical attention.

Certainly men should thrive and be the best they can be – purely because as human beings, each and every one of us deserves that. However the notion that stoicism even remotely gives men that, is utterly dogmatic and delusional whichever way you slice it.

This is a culture I have noticed that is fairly widespread in the movement. Heck, even Paul Elam, the founder of AVfM, has on at least 2 occasions, been guilty of having anti-feminist blinders on to the point where male survivors of rape and domestic violence encountered utterly misandrist responses from him (myself and James Landrith).

Ultimately, the task of overcoming misandry and male disposability is a highly complex one. You have feminism, build upon traditionalism, built upon gynocentrism, with at least half a dozen layers of constructs and conventions in between. It’s a minefield that needs to be navigated if we’re to truly wind up with a society which values men.

Otherwise we’ll simply wind up with a different version of gynocentrism that is still ultimately an utterly horrible deal for men.

I still think your critique of the use of the term “mangina” is wrong. It isn’t used by MRA’s to make men more useful to women, but to make them better team players to other men.

The fact is, as long as there is a Team Woman, which I believe is a biological and unchanging fact,there needs to be a Team Man,unless we want to get blitzed again. They’re spiking the ball into the endzone again and again because we have,excuse me, manginas on defensive tackle,to use a football metaphor.

We can’t cause Team Woman to disband, all we can do is remove the ability of Team Woman to assert itself. One way to do this is to make sure every man knows that this selfish tendency in woman is present and to shame them, YES SHAME THEM, for cooperating with it, rather than suppressing it.

This is not to say that I would prefer that women were barred from organizing in their own interests, but rather, it would be nice if every time some female politician proposed a bill to aid women and women only (the only kind they propose), instead of manginas lining up behind them to cheer and applaud about how brave and noble it was, some snide comment about “Oh,how original, that’s only the fiftieth bill for women we’ve seen this month.” or mock-earnest question from a male journalist “What do you think is the most noble part about sponsoring a bill you could personally benefit from some day?” was made.

They need to be reminded of Team Woman every day, and they need to know that every single one of us is watching for Team Woman to rear her ugly head and we recognize it each and every time we see it.

This will have a sanitizing effect on the social and political landscape, FREEING us from gynocentrism, not supporting it.

And if it doesn’t stop women from doing it, which it probably won’t, it will at least get them to admit,after the millionth time we point it out, that we have every bit as much right to organize in our own interests as they do, males though we be.

But we can’t do it if we have manginas who are more interested in promoting themselves by sucking up to women than getting on board and pointing out women’s sexist inclinations.

They never shut up about how sexist WE supposedly are, and if they can’t find any sexism, they make it up. A lot of times, manginas make it up for them. If we could shame or connive manginas into pointing out female sexism for us instead,we’d have one hell of a PR machine at our disposal. And,fuck me, I think we could DO it. If you could convince them that the shortest route to sticking their (usually rapist) penises into the women they crave lies not in accepting a plastic penis from these women up their bums and flagellating themselves in their presence, but in supporting the raising of the male profile in general so that the “rising tide lifts all ships” principle or “trickle-down pussy effect” elevates even their twisted loser asses into “would hit” status for women,then I think we could get even their stupid asses on board.

So far,I’ve been unable to figure out how to do this because I can’t put myself in their position,as women fucking LOVE me,and I’ve never needed to rape any of them to get my dick sucked dry. Hell, a few of them have raped me.

If you had that natural empathic quality that would allow you to put yourself in the position of a man who thinks taking a dildo up his bum from a man-hating androgynous lesbian somehow makes him more of a man, and then you used some Reaganesque economic voodoo bullshit to convince them they were about to hit the Andrea Dworkin pussy motherlode, you could probably convince all of the tards to come on over and play ball.

I don’t know what’s more effective than pointing out their natural testosterone deficiency and playing on their stereotypical pathological self-hatred to get them on Team Man, but if you can come up with something better,go for it. Like I said, the Dworkinite lesbo-pussy angle might be more effective, but how are you going to convince them to disregard what the Dworkinites SAY and do what we say instead?

That’s the fundamental difference between us and them. Every one of us knows, some naturally, some by experience, that what a woman says and what she believes and does are different things entirely. They,on the other hand, haven’t figured it out yet, or refuse to believe it.

“I don’t know what’s more effective than pointing out their natural testosterone deficiency and playing on their stereotypical pathological self-hatred to get them on Team Man, but if you can come up with something better,go for it.”

I’m going to zero in on this part of your reply, purely because it gets to the heart of the problem.

Certainly male feminists need to be mocked and shamed without a doubt and you’ll get no argument from me on that front. However the issue is that this approach actually reinforces gynocentric conventions.

That response you had of “I don’t know what’s more effective than pointing out their natural testosterone deficiency” is arguably a socially hardwired response ingrained into us in terms of policing other men socially when they fail to adhere to an acceptable version of masculinity. The reason it seems so perfect – almost instinctive to be exact – is because the same social conditioning that results in men telling male rape victims and battered men to either “grow a pair”, “man up” or “take a teaspoon of cement and harden the fuck up”. It’s also the same conditioning where a 12 year old boy who is raped by a pedophile is seen as becoming a man.

The way the convention works is that while women socially police men by isolating them sexually, men, through such slurs, isolate other men through genitalia based emasculation. Yes it’s an easy shot, but the problem is that it’s too easy and the collateral damage is that you wind up reinforcing gynocentrism through the continued use of a gynocentric convention, for the purpose of combating gynocentrism.

In short, I oppose it because to be brutally honest, it makes as much sense as screwing everything on legs to regain your virginity.

As for the alternative, I have and will continue to run with (and I’m open to better alternatives too i might add) is self-deprecating lemming and accusing them of having lemming complexes. In my experience it pisses them off big time too. Why? Because most people these days associate lemmings with the computer game of the same name and specifically the cliff jumping idiots in it who are determined to self destruct. It’s an insult which goes beyond calling them screwed up morons, by throwing a masochistic death wish into the mix.

However the difference is that unlike using the slur “mangina”, it avoids reinforcing a gynocentric convention in the process of using it. I realise that this may seem inconvenient in the short term, but I will never support the usage of gynocentric conventions- no matter how well intentioned that usage might be.

” The reason it seems so perfect – almost instinctive to be exact – is because the same social conditioning that results in men telling male rape victims and battered men to either “grow a pair”, “man up” or “take a teaspoon of cement and harden the fuck up”. It’s also the same conditioning where a 12 year old boy who is raped by a pedophile is seen as becoming a man.”

See, that’s where I keep getting lost. I just don’t see the connection. I call male feminists manginas as well as speak up for boys who were raped and/or abused and men who suffer from depression every time I see someone doing these things that you’re mentioning.

” I realise that this may seem inconvenient in the short term, but I will never support the usage of gynocentric conventions- no matter how well intentioned that usage might be.”

Well, the flipside of calling male feminists manginas,for me, is acknowledging the gentleman’s code towards those who are not part of the problem of sabotaging male interests. That is, you are a gentleman and I am a gentleman,so we can disagree about minor issues while still being in agreement about the overall picture. If that is the case, then we are men of the same rank and caliber and men whose concern is for those within our group who are suffering and not ourselves;which basically makes us co-workers,or “teammates”,if you will. I’m not trying to call you out on this issue or anything like that.

I completely agree we both ultimately want the same thing, however this is a case of me recognising something you’ve failed to grasp by my being able to see a little further down the rabbit hole on this one. Let’s face it, we’re all going to be on one side or another of that situation with men’s issues at one point or another and there’s no shame in that at all.

The problem you’re hitting on this issue is one of double ignorance (and I mean that strictly in a Platonian/Aristotilean sense of the term), which let’s face it, is an “occupational hazard” of advocating for men.

Certainly it’s possible to call out a male feminist as a mangina and defend male rape and DV victims at the same time. However the process becomes oxymoronic – you’re both condemning the emasculation of male victims and simultaneously further normalising one of the main tools used to emasculate male victims.

Bear in mind that one of the main users of said tool, are tradcons. Disregard for the minute that male feminists support feminism and the way that harms men and boys. The fact is that male feminists fly in the face of accepted masculine norms. So when you use the term mangina, disregarding the support of feminism and therefore intent of using such a term against male feminists; you are using a gynocentric convention to emasculate men through genitalia based shaming due to their failing to adhere to stoic masculine norms (yes I am fully aware that they personify the role of male protector to the extreme in saying that).

In doing so you send a message to “anti-feminist” (*snort*) tradcons that even MRAs think that the usage of genitalia-based emasculation against men who fail to adhere to masculine norms (including MRAs on some men’s issues, and male victims/survivors), is acceptable. Before you go to dispute that, consider the tradcon fallacy raised in the blog post we’re commenting on.

In doing so, you ultimately provide as much of an ideological shield to tradcons as the “nice feminists” do to the likes of Valerie Solanas, as unwitting as it might be.

Hopefully that helps you see just that little bit further down the rabbit hole on this issue.